By contrast, facilitation tends to be used at the beginning of a problem-solving negotiation, before a conflict has crystalized. In addition, the work of facilitation tends to be confined to what happens at the table when the parties are face-to-face. Facilitation can be viewed as a bundle of meeting management skills that anyone can employ, such as coordinating the flow of conversation, ensuring that participants observe time limits, cooling tempers when talks get overheated, and periodically summarizing the essence of emerging agreements.
When dealing with various conflicts that arise in negotiation, too many managers and organizations overlook the benefits of incorporating facilitation into their standard routines. As a result, they waste time and money—and risk escalating conflicts that could be resolved in their early stages.
Why Do Managers Resist Facilitation?
JOE IS RELUCTANT to hire a professional facilitator for at least three reasons—reasons that hold back many managers from seeking the assistance they need.
Fear of appearing incompetent. In Joe’s company, senior managers are expected to be able to handle difficult conversations and negotiations on their own. Of course running a meeting may mean nothing more to some people than imposing an agenda and raising each item in turn. If your group is made up entirely of your direct reports, this approach might work. But when you are simply a titular chair, like Joe, with no authority over other group members, negotiation management requires joint problem-solving skills. These include knowing when and how to divide or combine issues to create value, when to encourage preparatory work away from the table, and when and how to insist that naysayers offer alternative proposals that everyone can accept. Unfortunately, no one ever taught Joe these skills. Clever though he may be, orchestrating a consensus-building effort that meets everyone’s most important interests is not an intuitively obvious task for him.
Fear of looking weak. At some point during his professional career, Joe surmised that allowing (or, worse still, asking) someone to help run “his” negotiation session would be viewed as a sign of weakness. As a result, he worries that other alliance members will think they can walk all over him if he “abdicates control” to a professional facilitator. His self-image as a manager rests in large part on his ability to face down others whenever disagreements arise. In the past, his company has rewarded this warrior behavior. Better to lose with style, Joe thinks, than to cave in and be saddled with a reputation for weakness.
Fear of losing control. Joe is confused about how much authority a facilitator would have over alliance negotiations. His greatest fear is that once he hands over the gavel to an outsider, he will no longer influence the outcome of the group’s debates. In Joe’s view, the best way to advance his and his company’s interests is to exercise authority over other alliance members. In the past, his position as a chair has given him disproportionate influence over the agenda, the air time each participant receives, the spin put on group decisions, and even the substance of these decisions. While this has ceased to be the case, as other members have pushed back harder and harder, Joe’s instinct is to fight even more fiercely to regain control.
When Facilitation Goes Wrong
FACILITATION WORKS ONLY when the facilitator is matched properly to the group and to the situation. The following signs of trouble may suggest that you need a different facilitator or that facilitation may not work for your group.
1.Poor chemistry. Your facilitator’s personal style may be too forceful or not forceful enough for the group
2.Lack of knowledge or experience. Your facilitator may have great process management skills yet lack the organizational or institutional background needed to comprehend the issues facing the group.
3.Lack of control. If your group leader won’t let the facilitator do her job, it’s a mistake to go forward. Similarly, if your group members have different expectations of the facilitator’s responsibilities, she won’t succeed.
4.Internal friction. Underlying group divisions may make it impossible for any facilitator to proceed effectively. In these situations, members may try to blame the facilitator for their own failures.
5.External pressures. When a group is facing unreasonable deadlines, facilitation will probably fail. The group must be committed to taking at least the minimum amount of time required to work out differences.
Bringing a Professional Facilitator on Board
ON THE BRINK OF LOSING both the debate about the European software acquisition and, in all likelihood, his leadership position in the alliance, Joe decides to take his assistant’s advice. He contacts a small facilitation firm recommended by the management school where he received his MBA. After meeting with the head of the firm, Joe hires Claire, the firm’s senior staff member and an experienced facilitator. He then places informal calls to each member of the alliance. To his surprise, no one objects to Claire’s attending the group’s next meeting.
As the meeting begins, Claire spends a few minutes outlining her responsibilities. She explains that her role is simply to help move the conversation along; she will not dictate the substance of group decisions. Tired of Joe’s overbearing approach, the members grant Claire speedy approval of the key elements of a contract clarifying her duties. Her previous work history in the software industry gives the members confidence that she won’t slow down their conversation.
Let’s look more closely at the tasks Claire took on—and why the alliance members, including Joe, end up having a very positive experience with facilitation.
Working with the group to structure an agenda. Once her contract was in place, Claire met individually with each alliance member to find out as much as possible about his or her interests, priorities, and concerns. She promised to keep their disclosures confidential; that is, she indicated that she would not attribute any specific comments or suggestions to any particular member. Having had these conversations, Claire was prepared to shape an agenda with which everyone felt comfortable.
Setting and enforcing consensus-building ground rules. At her first working meeting with the group, Claire presented a short list of ground rules that the members quickly endorsed. Most reflected practices already in place—such as “Wait to be recognized before you start talking”—but some were new. For example, Claire promised to ensure that everyone would have a chance to discuss each agenda item at each meeting. She also promised to prepare draft summaries of all discussions and decisions, and to distribute them within twenty-four hours after each meeting. Each member was guaranteed a chance to make corrections to the summaries before they became final. Codifying these ground rules enabled Claire to move forward with the group’s full support.
Capturing in writing a fair and accurate summary of a negotiated outcome. Whenever the group reached major decisions, Claire had the responsibility of producing a single written proposal incorporating everyone’s suggestion for a package that would satisfy them all. When it came time to make a decision about the software purchase from the European company, Claire helped the group understand why the split in its ranks had occurred. Specifically, she noted that the two factions were so focused on their need to win that they misunderstood the source of their disagreement. With Claire’s help, they negotiated a hard deadline for either producing their own shared version of the software or buying the European company’s version.
Overcoming Resistance
JOE’S WORST FEARS never materialized. Claire didn’t attempt to take over the meetings and didn’t try to impose her views on the group. He retained his title as chair, and he was free to speak his mind and present his company’s views in a straightforward fashion. He also continued to handle all interactions with top brass at each member company, since Claire’s role was limited to interactions with the alliance representatives at the meetings.
All alliance members contributed equally to Claire’s fee, which was disbursed by Joe’s company. From time to time, the group amended Claire’s contract to reflect additional responsibilities they wanted her to assume.
At one point, for instance, they asked her to coach them on how to improve their facilitation skills so that they could more effectively manage impromptu negotiations within their own companies.
PROFESSIONAL FACILITATORS HELP:
•Structure agendas
•Set ground rules
•Keep the discussion focused and productive
•Record and summarize the discussion and outcomes
Over time, the alliance became much more productive, allowing the group to reduce scheduled meetings from monthly to every other month and to rely on Claire to touch base with all members between talks. Indeed, the other alliance members made a point of congratulating Joe on having had the insight to hire Claire, and they became enthusiastic advocates of professional facilitation within their own companies.
DISPUTE PREVENTION: IT’S A GOOD IDEA, RIGHT?
I SAT ON A PANEL at the annual meeting of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution in New York City. CPR has worked for more than thirty years to convince law firms and in-house corporate counsel to take dispute resolution seriously. One of CPR’s great contributions is that they came up with the idea of adding a dispute resolution clause to all kinds of contracts so that parties don’t resort to litigation at the first sign of disagreement. In a sense, a dispute resolution clause is a means of anticipating predictable surprises, that is, disputes that might arise during the course of implementing an agreement or a contract. The parties may not know exactly what disagreements will emerge, but they can be pretty sure that one side or the other is sure to read the agreement differently or want to make adjustments in light of changing circumstances.
Our panel assignment was simple enough: make the case for dispute prevention, not just facilitation or mediation. We were motivated by a simple cartoon showing someone peering down from the top of a cliff at a waiting ambulance below. The ambulance driver is ready to dash off to the hospital with the next victim injured in a fall; no one has thought to build a fence around the edge of the precipice to keep people from falling in the first place. We were talking about building a fence to avoid disaster, not just arranging to have an ambulance ready when the inevitable occurs.
It turns out that in the construction industry, dispute prevention has been the norm for years through the use of partnering agreements. Companies entering into construction contracts may have to work together for several years to complete a project. Delay at any point during the construction of a large building can kill a project. So, before construction begins, the financial sponsor, the architect, the builder, and sometimes others (like the construction union) sign an agreement, promising to meet regularly (whether there’s trouble or not), keep lines of communication open, monitor progress jointly, and put a standing panel of neutrals (i.e., mediators or arbitrators—another kind of dispute resolver who is granted decision-making authority by the disputants) in place so that small disagreements can be resolved quickly, before they escalate. By putting a carefully designed dispute handling system in place, it turns out that most disagreements or misunderstandings can actually be avoided. There are unambiguous findings from numerous studies to support this.
Why, then, are dispute prevention measures so rare in other sectors? We speculated that it might be because industry leaders just don’t know about the idea of partnering agreements or standing dispute resolution panels (which have very quick timetables for airing and resolving disagreements). But that seems unlikely since the same law firms and in-house counsel, trained at the same law schools, work in these other sectors too. So we explored other obstacles to using dispute prevention techniques. Our best guess is that law firms (or lawyers in general) might be the problem. What glory is there in being the person responsible for avoiding a dispute? And how can a legal services provider make any money if they succeed in avoiding most litigation?
I suggested that we add a provision calling for a dispute prevention bonus in all legal services contracts. So in fashioning a business deal, for example, the law firm involved in writing or reviewing the contract would add a provision calling for a financial bonus (set, perhaps, as a percentage of the expected value of the deal or the transaction) to be paid to the lawyers involved if there is no litigation throughout the life of the contract. Deductions from the total might be made to cover the cost of arbitration if the standing panel needs to use it (but not for rapid-fire mediation). Imagine all the lawyers working like crazy throughout the life of a project or a contract to be sure that parties stay in close contact, communicate effectively, smooth out their misunderstandings quickly, and take prearranged steps to resolve minor disagreements! I have no doubt that lawyers would become skilled in dispute avoidance if they had sufficient incentives to do so.
At the conference, we talked about the four prerequisites for dispute prevention. The first is a written dispute avoidance or dispute handling agreement that spells out appropriate procedures step-by-step. The second is a requirement that the most senior managers on both (or all) sides of a contract or a working relationship must be called in at the first sign of trouble. (This seems to motivate everyone below them to do whatever is necessary to keep things under control.) The third is the inclusion of a standing neutral or panel of neutrals, so that the parties don’t have to scramble to find someone acceptable to everyone—and who understands their business—when small problems arise. The last is an explicit financial disincentive or a dispute prevention bonus to keep everyone motivated.
GROUPS CAN PREVENT DISPUTES BY:
•Crafting an agreement up front that lays out specific procedures for resolving problems
•Having senior managers committed to stepping in at the first sign of trouble
•Having a neutral party on-call to help when necessary
•Setting a specific financial disincentive or dispute prevention bonus as motivation
My own take on dispute prevention is that clients of all kinds will have to demand that legal service providers emphasize the idea before it will spread as rapidly as it should.
WHAT TO DO WHEN THE OTHER PERSON IS LYING
THERE’S A LOT OF CONFUSION about the best way to respond to a lie. One strategy is to ignore it and act as if the statement was never made. People who take this tack hope they’ll avoid giving a false statement any traction. A second strategy is to suggest that the person making the statement probably didn’t realize what he or she was saying. This approach presumes that it’s always best to give someone the benefit of the doubt and presume there’s just a misunderstanding. I don’t agree with either approach. From my standpoint, the most effective response to a lie is to name it, frame it, and claim it.
If I think someone is lying—that is, deliberating making a statement they know to be false, I’ll say out loud, “That’s a lie.” Yes, I’m giving visibility to the statement, but from my standpoint, I’d rather the statement be labeled as a lie than allowed to stand unchallenged.
That’s not enough. It is important to say why I think the statement is a lie and to suggest what the motive of the liar might be. I call this “framing.” Motive is important. If I can’t think of any reason the person might have for misrepresenting the truth, then I might chalk their statement up to ignorance or reckless disregard for the truth. So for me to call something a lie, I have to believe that the person making the statement has a motive for misrepresenting the truth. I link my characterization of their motive with the evidence that ought to convince any neutral observer that their statement is untrue. “That’s a lie. That’s not what it says on page 1,014. I can only assume you are trying to make the president look bad.” Or, “No, that’s not what happened on that date. I think they are saying that because they would rather have us believe something that casts them in a better light. Here’s reliable information to the contrary.”
Finally, it is important to own any claim that a statement is a lie. This means that I need to be comfortable making that claim. If I’m going to call someone a liar, I ought to do it in
a very public way—to their face, if possible. I’m certainly not going to do it anonymously. The credibility of my characterization of their motive hinges, in part, on my willingness to stand behind my charge. “That’s a lie. She is just trying to gain publicity for herself and play to her constituency. The bill doesn’t say that at all. In fact, here’s what it says. I’d love a chance to meet with her and have her show me exactly where it says what she claims.”
Name it as a lie. Frame it by postulating the liar’s motive and offering evidence to the contrary that any neutral observer would accept. And claim responsibility for your countercharge.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE RESPONSE TO A LIE IS TO:
•Name it
•Frame it
•Claim it
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PROVIDE LEADERSHIP
Build Your Organization’s Negotiating Capabilities
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF LEADERSHIP
THERE ARE A GREAT MANY theories of leadership—from highly centralized, top-down (almost militaristic) models to more decentralized, bottom-up, enabling (almost group self-management) models. Leaders who get others to do what they want by using their authority to threaten or punish can, in fact, get things done. As we flatten organizations, however, leaders who can get things done only by using strong-arm tactics are becoming obsolete. Organizations that have eliminated layers of middle management need lower-level staff to take more responsibility. In this context, companies and groups put a premium on finding managers who can motivate or catalyze networks of employees, volunteers, supporters, investors, and others to define what needs to be done, take the necessary initiative, and encourage cooperation.
Good for You, Great for Me Page 13